We also see a lot of teams that are fresh out of school, usually a supervising professor with a couple of his or her PhD students having come across some kind of technological breakthrough in university and trying to commercialize that.
Many health care breakthroughs come through university research programs and government grants, but bringing an innovation to fruition and managing wide and rapid distribution usually requires the profit-seeking private sector.
"It's a breakthrough budget for universities," says Western Ontario President Paul Davenport.
Companies are finding it more profitable and reliable to scour the world for breakthrough technologies in universities, smaller companies, and national laboratories and license those technologies rather than rely on their own research staff to produce the breakthroughs they need.
In 2014, he pledged $120 million to two Swiss universities, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, to establish a center to accelerate medical breakthroughs.
Several big firms have told Mr Schramm recently that they are considering switching research to universities in some developing countries, because there will be no question over who owns the rights to a breakthrough in those countries.The university bottleneck is number two in Mr Schramm's top three worries.
We've seen some work on digitizing the content in our universities, but we're still waiting on the breakthrough that definitively brings the university experience into the 21st century.
Scientific breakthroughs coming from universities can contribute to the emergence of new industries, such as in the case of biotechnology.
Researchers in university labs find vast numbers of breakthroughs which can better the world.
In some cases, it's very fair for someone right out of university who finds a technological breakthrough and... that breakthrough alone is understandable and comprehensible to the market and it's a very backable company, and we've done that in the past.
Just as he was beginning his research, a Japanese university scientist made a breakthrough that transformed gallium nitride into a contender.
